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Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Another Scandal: EPA Made Conservative Groups Pay Fees It Waived For Lib Groups

Here's another example of unequal treatment by Obama's government (The Lid).

The EPA is not preventing groups from becoming tax exempt, but charging conservative groups for information while giving freebies to liberal groups. The fees applied to Freedom of Information Act requests -- allegedly, the EPA waived them for liberal groups far more often than it did for conservative ones.

Two committees within the House of Representatives are investigating the charges, the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (the oversight committee is also holding hearings on the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups).

"I don't think it is fair at all. It is not fair to the American taxpayer -- the American taxpayer should expect and demand that the EPA treats everyone equally in regard to these requests," said Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Tim Murphy, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "This cannot be tolerated. As we see more federal agencies with this kind of bias, it is and should be a concern for all of us."

Research by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank, claims that the political bias is routine when it comes to deciding which groups are charged fees. Christopher Horner, senior fellow at CEI, said liberal groups have their fees for documents waived about 90 percent of the time, in contrast with conservative groups that it claims are denied fee waivers about 90 percent of the time.

That is precisely what the FOIA was passed to prevent. But the EPA records provided to the CEI in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demonstrate an ongoing pattern of making it far more difficult and expensive for limited-government groups to access public records,.